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Chapter 4: Subtle Music in Your Soul

How to start the journey? Start becoming more and more a witness. Whatsoever you do, do it with deep alertness; then even small things become sacred. Then cooking or cleaning become sacred, they become worship. It is not a question of what you are doing, the question is how you are doing it. You can clean the floor like a robot, a mechanical thing; you have to clean it, so you clean it. Then you miss something beautiful. Then you wasted those moments in only cleaning the floor. Cleaning the floor could have been a great experience; you missed it. The floor is cleaned but something that could have happened within you has not happened. If you were aware, not only the floor but you would have felt a deep cleansing. Clean the floor full of awareness, luminous with awareness. Work or sit or walk - but one thing has to be a continuous thread: make more and more moments of your life luminous with awareness. Let the candle of awareness burn in each moment, in each act.

The cumulative effect is what enlightenment is. The cumulative effect, all the moments together, all small candles together become a great source of light.

And the second part of the question is: “What does it exactly mean to transcend sex?”

Sex is a subtle subject, delicate because centuries of exploitation, corruption, centuries of perverted ideas, conditioning are associated with the word sex. The word is very loaded. It is one of the most loaded words in existence. You say God - it seems empty. You say sex - it seems too loaded. A thousand and one things arise in the mind: fear, perversion, attraction, a tremendous desire, and a tremendous anti-desire also. They all arise together. Sex - the very word creates a confusion, a chaos. It is as if somebody has thrown a rock in a silent pool; millions of ripples arise - just the word sex! Humanity has lived under very wrong ideas.

So the first thing: Why do you ask how to transcend sex? Why do you want to transcend sex in the first place? You are using a beautiful word, transcend, but out of a hundred, ninety-nine are the possibilities that you mean, “How to repress sex?”

.Because a person who has understood that sex has to be transcended is not even worried about transcending it, because transcendence comes through experience. You cannot manage it. It is not something that you have to do. You simply pass through many experiences and those experiences make you more and more mature.

Have you watched that, at a certain age, sex becomes important? Not that you make it important. It is not something that you make happen; it happens. At the age of fourteen, somewhere near there, suddenly the energy is flooded with sex. It happens as if the floodgates have been opened in you. Subtle sources of energy which were not yet open have become open and your whole energy becomes sexual, colored with sex. You think sex, you sing sex, you walk sex - everything becomes sexual. Every act is colored. This happens; you have not done anything about it. It is natural.

Transcendence is also natural. If sex is lived totally, with no condemnation, with no idea of getting rid of it, then at the age of forty-two.just as at the age of fourteen, sex gets opened and the whole energy becomes sexual. At the age of forty-two, or nearabout, those floodgates close again. And that too is as natural as sex becoming alive; it starts disappearing.

Sex is transcended not by any effort on your part. If you make any effort that will be repressive because it has nothing to do with you. It is inbuilt in your body, in your biology. You are born as sexual beings; nothing is wrong in it. That is the only way to be born. To be human is to be sexual.